


bourbon, blood, and backward glances

by squiirby



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jschlatt Angst (Video Blogging RPF), Jschlatt-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Swearing, Violence, i like my goat man :), its not super graphic though, just ...really heavily implied, oops! all angst, schlatt has a heart attack and fucking dies, theyre just mentioned tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:14:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28974948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squiirby/pseuds/squiirby
Summary: Honeyed words couldn’t save a drunk, in the end. Words, as sweet and golden as they were, couldn’t reach down into a palpitating, failing heart. The best people and the worst intentions couldn’t save someone who lived every day like it was to be their last. Any chance he had for survival had been punctured by a child whose horns had only just begun to grow in.If he was going to sink, why let it be the water that drowned him?-alternatively: my favorite minecraft lawful evil villain businessgoat literally dies
Comments: 3
Kudos: 50





	bourbon, blood, and backward glances

**Author's Note:**

> okay so i literally don't know why i'm writing fanfiction for a MINECRAFT ROLEPLAY- and also for a one-off villain who will probably never canonically come back, and also to easily the worst person in the whole smp, but this is a thing now. it exists. if you were looking for something schlatt-centric for whatever god forsaken reason...its me, squiid, your local side character dealer to deliver~! you're....welcome? anyway.  
> also in case you didnt read the tags: TW for child abuse and alcoholism. it's dark, i'm just gonna say that. sorry but i could not let a character as tragic as him just go angst-less. :)
> 
> have a lovely day! <3

_Breathe._

It was a concept he should have valued more- a word he should have remembered.

A word that came with memories. Memories of a sick kid, of hacking up his lungs until his throat bled, of a hand on his back, a deep voice telling him to “breathe”. Breathing hadn’t ever come easy- not to him, as a child. Because nothing ever came easy to him.

 _Life_ hadn’t come easy, either. He’d grown out of the asthma attacks- like they always said he would, and he _had-_ but as quickly as the first hardship left, it only returned in a new form. When the hand on his back grew heavy and cold, when the words became sharper, revealing an edge his hazy childhood did not recall. The day his father’s hands became as heavy as the horns on his head.

The day he was big enough to defend himself was the day he learned how to. Running- running had always been the best option- running from his problems, from everything loud and uncertain and painful. It was so _easy_ to flee, so easy to run- run from bloody hands and an echoing voice that pursued him from day to night, from fearful rise to feverish sleep.

A voice that had once told him to “just breathe”, so kindly, now had turned into daggers, ripping into his ears. The voice that had quickly lost all previous warmth, now drowned out by rough, brash anger. A voice that no longer spoke soothingly to a tormented child, only asking for another beer.

Thus always to tyrants, as it seemed. Like father, like son.

 _A vicious cycle,_ he thought to himself, glumly. _A vicious cycle indeed._

He had always thought perhaps fearful children turned into cunning adults- and for a good long while that theory had held out to be true. He _was_ smart. He was good at things others weren’t. He was strategic, intelligent- and a liar. 

Not necessarily a _good_ liar, he had once mused to himself. Convincing enough to scrape by, maybe. It’s not that he was particularly believable, or charismatic, or good-looking. (Which he fancied he was, but that was entirely besides the point.) He was a good liar because he meant every word, every syllable- not thinking ahead didn’t matter when every word was filled with _intent_ , pure and unfiltered. Convincing, powerful, _resonant_. 

People listened when he spoke because he _made_ them. Unlike his father before him- _(not like him not like him not like him)_ he had learned how to use words instead of blows to the head. Every sentence, sharpened into a weapon of steel he wielded with his tongue. His hands were bloody in an entirely different respect- no longer from broken bottles but from words of honey and glass.

Such a fragile thing, words were.

He could spin a story- _damn_ well, too. He could lull rage into inaction at a breath. Weapons lowered in his presence, chaos ceasing when he spoke. Wars stood still at the twitch of a finger or the passing of a glance. The _world_ stood still for him- as he had always suspected, fearful children into cunning adults; and tyrants to tyrants.

Honeyed words couldn’t save a drunk, in the end. Words, as sweet and golden as they were, couldn’t reach down into a palpitating, failing heart. The best people and the worst intentions couldn’t save someone who lived every day like it was to be their last. Any chance he had for survival had been punctured by a child who's horns had only just begun to grow in.

If he was going to sink, why let it be the water that drowned him?

_“Are you fucking drunk? Seriously?”_

_“This is your fault! This is-”_

The liquor burns as it slides down his throat but the pain only drags him deeper into a trance, a testament to the idea that history repeats itself. Nature versus nurture, trauma as new to the bearer as lakewater was to rain, recycled for another day. Nothing was new under the sun-

_-and you are just like your father._

The thought made him dizzy- but that might have been just the vertigo, back against cold metal, knees threatening to buckle. The voices that had once sounded panicked began to buzz in his ears, fading from worried to apathetic as he drank. Again, and again, and again. The bottle seemed to never empty, the ringing in his ears seemed to never stop, and his heart never seemed to slow, pounding so feverishly hard he thought he might explode.

So, he drinks. And sits, and hides, like the coward his father had branded him as.

_Again, and again, and again._

He takes another drink. This time the bottle doesn’t fall from his lips, instead tipping up, up, up to the ceiling, a sort of nuanced reverence in the vertical position, facing up to whatever uncaring god was above- if any. He almost felt like falling to his knees- like a sinner at confession, prone to a sky he’d begged to strike him down thousands of times before. Every one of his pleas for mercy from the earth he walked on fell unheard, as uncaring and cold as he remembered.

And so the cycle repeated, the wicked to wicked and the drunks to drunks. The voices had fallen into a sort of grim, silent stupor- _what, Alex, are you fuckin’ speechless for once?-_ watching as his legs shook and the bottle drained at a terrifyingly steady rate, burning like acid in his mouth, sending bolts of pain through his body. Every brief ache came with a second of euphoria, then fading as quickly as it had come.

The voices are shouting, now, as loud and sharp as he remembered from so long ago. As biting and scathing as the sounds that settled in his skull and forced the bottle to his lips, sunk him into oblivion, dragging him down, down, down to drown where no one would find his body.

“You do know this is your-”

“ _-your_ fault, right-”

Though the bottle is empty, it’s somehow still heavy in his hands. The world begins to blur into focus as clarity fights to reign in his mind, neurons firing so quickly he’s not sure if he can control them anymore. His thoughts come in sporadic bursts, every one of them panicked and muddled and conflicted, and when he tries to inhale nothing happens, his lungs beginning to fold in on themselves.

_Breathe._

_No- no- no, please-_

For a moment he remembers lying in a shadow cast by a tall man, horns spiraling into the darkness, bigger than his but just as sharp. Shattered glass is buried in his lip and hard floor under his cheek, eyes squeezed shut and legs tucked against his chest. _Breathe._ “Please-” his voice comes in a sharp hiccup, a childlike whimper so far from the chilly coolness that his two former companions were once so familiar with, _“Please don’t kill me.”_

“Don’t... kill me.” Shakily, he staggers to his feet, wheezing for breath. “Please don’t-” His lungs give out once more and seize, his legs struggling to keep his body upright as he doubles over, coughing blood and foam onto the floor as the onlookers watch in horror, mortified but inactive as the mess unfolds before them. “I- I don’t want-” he stumbles forward, chest heaving, slumping against the wall, empty vodka bottle clenched loosely in sweaty palms, threatening to fall from his unsteady grasp.

_“Don’t kill me!” squeaks a child’s voice, desperate as he scrambles away across floors, splinters stabbing into shaky hands. “Please, please don’t kill me-”_

_“Don’t kill me,” grins a gangly teenager, horns too big for his head, slumped against a doorframe, suit wrinkled and lips quirked, revealing sharp fangs and a dead look behind red, slitted eyes. “That would be a waste, right?”_

_“Don’t.” The word falls from his mouth, no longer a plea and now a command- one that is listened to immediately. A command from someone who has grown into his father’s shoes and horns, from someone who has begun the cycle anew, bottle in hand._

He takes a swing- _(defend yourself or die defend yourself or die defend yourself or die)-_ and misses miserably, but he doesn’t care. Years of never fighting back as a child channel into rage at his fingertips, burning with hate, with wrath, with a sick, twisted _grief-_ he was big enough to fight back now, they couldn’t toss him around, he was impenetrable, he would _win_ , at _last-_

He swings again. The voices cumulate, melding into one, sliding in pitch until they match the one that haunts his nightmares, and with every fumbling blow he imagines his father, a silhouette of a bloodstained memory, painful and all too real. If he had only stood up for himself then- if he had only swung then- maybe he wouldn’t be here, in this fucking van, in this fucking _mess-_

“Don’t kill me,” he begs, the words slurring through his gaping mouth, as a slow, dull throb begins to make its way deep in the pit of his ribs. His head aches, he can still barely breathe, his lungs tied up with metal cords and weighed down by milestones. Every movement is harsh and clumsy and fails- maybe he _wants_ to hurt them, maybe he _wants_ to make them pay- or maybe his mind was vacated altogether, back to a decade and forever ago, defenseless again.

_Hit me, you fucking coward-_

The bottle is suddenly cold against his clammy hands. Suddenly he feels shakier than before, a tremor beginning at the base of his spine and spreading through his upper back and into his stomach and chest. It feels as though his organs have begun to vibrate, teeth rattling in his skull, sweat coalescing on his pinched brow and dripping into his glassy red eyes, the base of his horns where they met his scalp itching something horrible.

_Thump...thump...thump._

_What’s that noise?_

_Thump._

_Thump._

_Thump._

They’ve knocked the bottle out of his hands, they haven’t moved to kill him yet but new voices joining the frenzy are calling for it, dripping with malice- with hate, for _him,_ and no one else- piercing the steadily approaching night air and calling for his death. The scent of war and gunpowder is on the air but the stench of alcohol and his own blood is even more overpowering, filling his senses with tart bitterness and old, festered wounds reopened.

_Thump..._

_Thump..._

He backs up to the wall and for a moment the two nearest faces turn to concern- fox ears droop, dark eyes narrow- and the clamour of wrath outside drones into a low-pitched buzz, filling his ears with resentment, finding a home among his own self-hate, tucked away neatly along with the rest of his issues. Blood dribbles from his chin and he stares down at the bottle in his hands, sweat droplets mixing with tears down his face as he begins to gasp for air.

Suddenly, he realizes what’s happening. In one final, desperate moment of clarity, the reality of the situation begins to set in. He knows what’s happening, he can feel his organs begin to shut down, one by one- too long have they waited to give out, suffering years of abuse. Too long has this body held out, thirsty for water in place of gin, hungry for love instead of abhorrence. A futile longing for someone to care.

But no one did.

_Thump..._

_Thump..._

“I don’t want to die.” He looks up, meeting angry eyes and overcast faces. He begins to shake, trying to breathe but met only by emptiness, his lungs giving out. “I don’t-” he hiccups, bile rising in his throat, his grip on the bottle finally loosening, slipping from perspiring hands to join the rest of its fellows piled on the floor of the camper with a resounding, holllow clatter. “P-please, I’m a-afraid t-to- I’m afraid-”

_Thump._

_Thump._

“I’m afraid to d-die.”

He is met only by cold silence.

“Any last words, Schlatt?”

A bow takes aim- he hears the notch and the sound of metal hitting wood, ready to be buried in his chest if it gets the chance. A face he knows behind the bow, just beyond blurry lines he can’t quite make out. A voice he recognizes, just for a moment, one that doesn’t join the chorus of venom just outside of his range of perception. A young man, like him, so much like him, so _close_ to it, too...

He coughs, miserably, and for a moment he thinks nothing will happen, that in a moment he’ll be able to suck in another breath and keep talking his way out of the grave for another day. In a moment he’ll straighten up, redo his tie, smooth back his hair, and get back to running things. He just needs to- he just needs to _breathe_ , first-

But nothing happens.

No air fills his lungs.

An already weak heart can barely support the steadily draining oxygen from his system. His body aches, riddled with years of pain and poison, the last ounce of life it had so fervently clung to finally draining out of his mouth and his eyes. Blood and sweat drip down to the dirty floor, his lungs giving with a quiet _snap_ , his mind reeling, the pain beginning to fade into a dull, throbbing ache. His eyes glisten with water, hot tears leaking from the corners of his eyes and stinging as he blinks them back, as pathetic and scared as he had been the day his childhood was painted red.

“Schlatt...?”

_thump._

He takes one last shuddery wheeze, one last desperate attempt to take in air, failing for the last time.

With one final, muffled beat, his heart finally stops.

**Author's Note:**

> i should go to bed, huh


End file.
